


The Unimaginable

by houndinghell



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Faction and other characters left ambiguous, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Panic Attacks, main plot spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 17:45:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5426072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/houndinghell/pseuds/houndinghell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stopping the Institute is the right thing to do. She knows that, really and truly she does. She can do that. She has to. If she doesn't, then the Commonwealth will die. There is no other choice.</p>
<p>But that means her son has to die. And even once she's done it, it is unimaginable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unimaginable

_There are moments that the words don’t reach_  
_There is suffering too terrible to name_  
_You hold your child as tight as you can  
And push away the unimaginable_

\- "It's Quiet Uptown," Hamilton

For the second time of her life, her world goes up in bombs and fire.

Pure, white light swallows the whole sky, blinding out even the sun for a moment. It hurts more than light ever should, burning and blinding, great and terrible. Then the light is gone, leaving blooms of crimson and swaths of ochar behind in a towering mushroom cloud. Smoke and dust billow from the ground, scrabbling with dark and hungry fingers to cover every building, every tree, every rock that comes too close to their reach. The boom comes a few seconds late, some afterthought of a monster’s warning howl, and on its tail is the shockwave and the wind.

She closes her eyes. The light filters through her eyelids, turning her vision to a dusty red. If she tries, she can almost feel the heat from it, even from what must be miles away. Or maybe she just wants to feel it. Wants to touch the last thing that ever touched her son. That her son ever felt. Before…

This is how she will always define her life now. Before the bombs. After the bombs. Before she found her son. After he died.

She takes a deep breath and tries out the word again in her mind. Died. Her son is dead. Shaun is dead.

The thoughts feel odd and clunky, like trying to think clearly when you’re still half caught in a nightmare. You can never be sure what parts are real and what aren’t, but you hope it’s all of it because everything is strange and terrifying.

She raises a shaking hand to her mouth, the hand she used to press the button, and mouths it against her fingertips. Shaun is dead. Shaun is dead. Shaun is dead.

She breathes in. Breathes out.

Someone behind her says her name, but they don’t matter. Whoever they are, they have no place in her mind at this moment.

Her hand drops from her mouth to her breastbone. She’s not sure which is shaking harder--her hand, or her heart. Her pulse is going so wild she thinks her heart is trying to rattle her apart. She presses her fingers against her skin, harder and harder, like she can reach all the way down and still herself. Stop the panic that lurks in her before it has a chance to leak like radiation into her blood and never come out again. Her fingers curl and she digs her nails in, too. None of it helps.

There’s a hand on her elbow, tugging. Pulling her from the wall. From the fire.

“No.” Her voice is muffled to her own ears, the way things are heard through water.

“We should get you home.” The words arrive one by one, each dropping down towards her from an impossible distance. “You need to get out of here. It’s not safe.”

“No.” She tugs her arm out of reach. “I’m staying.” This is the last thing she has of him, her Shaun, her little boy. She can’t just walk away now. This is the least of everything she owes him. This is his funeral. And she is the only one who would ever mourn him.

Nobody reaches out to touch her a second time. If they stay or go, she doesn’t know, or care. Her eyes stay fixed on the brightest point long past the safety point, until every time she blinks she sees the afterimage of the explosion. Burned into her eyes as much as it is burned into her memories. She’ll see this when she closes her eyes on her deathbed, she feels certain.

She stands there and takes it all in, as tall and as proud as a pillar of salt in the desert. Watching years of labor and love cook in the radiation. Anything that was starting to grow there will never have that chance again, there’s no doubt about that. Good, bad, in-between. All it takes is one person deciding to make the call. You get to live. You don’t.

And wasn’t that why she and her son were at odds in the first place? Because he thought he got to decide who lived and who died? And so she decided to do it to his people, before he could do it to hers.

She breathes in. Breathes out and chokes on a pained keen. Pressing her hand to her mouth does little to muffle it the next time she breathes out--it’s high pitched and piercing and animalistic. It doesn’t sound like her, she knows that. She needs to stop making that noise. People should not make that noise. But the noise doesn’t stop. It keeps going, hitching every time she breathes in, coming faster and faster.

She left Shaun in there. Her Shaun, her son, her baby boy that grew up without her, with his little cowlick behind his ear and his father’s eyes and her chin and his grandmother’s nose. She was going to teach him how to play baseball. Take pictures of him on prom night. Teach him how to tie his shoes. Comfort him after nightmares. Support him as he took the world by storm, the way every parent believes their child can do.

The one person she’s meant to give anything--everything for. Her child. He was taken from her, and when she had a chance to be with him, some sliver of hope to be there for him… She ruined it.

And for what? For strangers who would be happier with him out of the world, who would toast to the day, who would sing her praises and delight in the ashes left behind?

The hands are back on her elbows, but they don’t pull her away from the wall this time. Just down, to the rough gravel scattered across the roof and into a pair of comforting arms. Her knees collapse at the slightest provocation without her say so. But what does it matter? The cloud is still unfurling, larger and taller with every moment, looming so high she thinks she understands now what it is to stand at the feet of giants.

How did the world ever recover from an infinite number of these bombs? How did anyone manage to come out of it and even begin to rebuild? Why did anyone think they could try again, that it was worth bothering about, when all it takes is one push of a button to take it away again? The world was there one minute, in a pair of serious eyes and a restrained smile and being called _mother_ for the first time. Now the world is gone. Boom.

“What have I done?”

Soothing hands cup her cheek, her temple, draw her against a strong shoulder. She pushes back at them with open palms, shaking her head only for them to embrace her even tighter. There’s not enough space, not enough air, not enough anything.

“Oh God, what have I _done_?”

She gasps and gasps and gasps, and she can’t breathe at all. There’s no air left, nothing left for her to cling to. She did that to herself the moment she pressed the button.

_Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds._

Shaun is dead. And she killed him.


End file.
